This invention relates to the field of software tracing. In particular, the invention relates to software tracing using Extensible Markup Language (XML) messages.
Software tracing is commonly used in computer systems during performance monitoring or fault diagnosis processes and logs information about a program's execution. This information is typically used for performance improvement and debugging purposes and diagnosis of problems. However, software tracing may also be a useful tool in data gathering.
Tracing the flow of messages through a system is a well-established and very useful technique for understanding and debugging software. However, tracing generally suffers from the following issues.
There are many different approaches for tracing, so users have to learn a different trace methodology for each product they are using.
End to end testing may span several products, which means tracing has to be engaged and later disengaged in several products.
Each product may write its own trace data in different formats and locations. This makes it difficult to understand and interpret tracing from end-to-end tests spanning several products.
Large quantities of trace data may also be generated, making it difficult to manage and interpret.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to address the aforementioned problems.